Re: ICH9 & Core2 Duo - kernel crash

[Pavol Cvengros <pavol.cvengros@primeinteractive.net>]

Bill Davidsen wrote:
> Pavol Cvengros wrote:
>> On Thursday 06 December 2007 21:15:53 Bill Davidsen wrote:
>>  
>>> Pavol Cvengros wrote:
>>>    
>>>> Hello,
>>>>
>>>> I am trying LKML to get some help on one linux kernel related problem.
>>>> Lately we got a machine with new HW from Intel. CPU is Intel Core2 Duo
>>>> E6850 3GHz with 2GB of RAM. Motherboard is Intel DG33BU with G33 
>>>> chipset.
>>>>
>>>> After long fight with kernel crashes on different things, we 
>>>> figured out
>>>> that if the multicore is disabled in bios, everything is ok and 
>>>> machine
>>>> is running good. No kernel crashes no problems, but with one core 
>>>> only.
>>>>
>>>> This small table will maybe explain:
>>>>
>>>> Cores   -     kernel   -   state
>>>>    2  -   nonsmp or smp  - crash
>>>>    1  -  smp or nonsmp  - ok
>>>>
>>>> All crashes have been different (swaper, rcu, irq, init.....) or we 
>>>> just
>>>> got internal gcc compiler error while compiling kernel/glibc/.... 
>>>> and the
>>>> machine was frozen.
>>>>
>>>> Please can somebody advise what to do to identify that problem more
>>>> precisely. (debug kernel options?)
>>>>
>>>> Our immpresion - ICH9 & ICH9R support in kernel is bad... sorry to 
>>>> say..
>>>>       
>>> I have seen unusual memory behavior under heavy load, in the cases I 
>>> saw
>>> it was heavy DMA load from multiple SCSI controllers, and one case with
>>> FFT on the CPU and heavy network load with gigE. Have you run 
>>> memtest on
>>> this hardware? Just a thought, but I see people running Linux on that
>>> chipset, if not that particular board.
>>>
>>> A cheap test even if it shows nothing. Of course it could be a CPU 
>>> cache
>>> issue in that one CPU, although that's unlikely.
>>>     
>>
>> yes, memtest was running all his tests without problems. The wierd 
>> thing is that all kernel crashes we have seen were different (as 
>> stated in original mail)....
>>
>>   
> The problem with memtest, unless I underestimate it, is that it 
> doesn't use all core and siblings, so it doesn't quite load the memory 
> system the way regular usage would. Needless to say, if this does turn 
> out to be a memory loading issue I don't know of any tools to really 
> test it. I fall back on part swapping, but that only helps if it's the 
> memory DIMM itself.
>

right now that machine has 2 x 1GB DDR2 - 800MHz.... do you think I 
should test the machine with only one DDR? (I hope to put there 4GB all 
together)